Creating Realistic Close up Sand Material
Particle system

You can use a particle system to spread a big number of small objects across the surface.

In the following scene there are a bunch of planes that sketches the overall surface of the terrain. They were made with A.N.T. landscape add-on with the "Dunes" preset and stacked one after the other to fill the camera frame:



The planes have a simple pbr monocolor shader with high rougness and it's lit by an HDRI.

Then several pebble-like objects have been created and assigned to a common group. Note that each one has a slightly different shader assigned. Some are brown, some are white, some are glossy, some are rough... just to give variation.

Thw workflow consist in creating a hair particle system for the object in front of the camera (the other are to far to be seen) that pick a random object from the group. The distribution of the particles is driven by weight paint layer in order to optimize the rendertime.

Particle size has been lowered, while particles number and interpolated children numeber has been increased.



Here's the rendered result of the previous scene with camera depth of field enabled and glare node in post processing.